9.10.18

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO GO WOBBLY.

Democrats who participated in the attacks on Kavanaugh are up for re-election in several Trump states. They must be shown the door back to private life in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, and dare we dream, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In West Virginia, Joe Manchin distinguished (and maybe preserved) himself as the lone yes vote for Kavanaugh in the party that otherwise savaged him. President Trump is surely grateful, but he should not dilute his vocal support for Republican challenger Patrick Morrisey.

It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But perhaps it is the end of the beginning.

Republicans, from the President on down, have finally sprouted spines that do not collapse out of fear over what Democrats or media tormentors might say. Confronted with hideous attacks that have withered past GOP majorities, this Trump-infused army drew a line in the sand and refused to budge.

Senator Graham, for instance, might not be invited back to Meet the Press for some time, although I think it would be fun to see him go full naval officer on Chuck Todd.

Perhaps Neo-Neocon (a recovering Massachusetts liberal mugged by reality around September 11, 2001) has the best explanation for those former RINO squishes punching back. It's a nine point argument: the bottom of the order comes through for Team Normal.

(7) At that point, it was the moderate wing of the GOP that was galvanized. They suddenly discovered that the rules they thought they’d been playing by all this time, the ones they thought at least some of their Democratic colleagues shared, meant nothing to the opposition. They either had never held them at all, or were more than willing to abandon them—and all sense of decency—in their lust for power.

(8) And that’s why it was the moderate side of the right that stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods in the Kavanaugh fight. Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, all of them harshly vilified in the past by the more conservative wing of the party, found themselves uttering words that those who had previously reviled them were now cheering.

(9) Those words from the RINOs had more power to rally the base than if the same messages had been delivered by senators further to the right. The factor of surprise made for a much more attention-getting story. Lindsay Graham’s tirade was much more newsworthy because it came from Graham rather than, for example, Ted Cruz. But in addition, because one of the biggest beefs the far right had previously had with the RINOs was the latters’ lack of courage and fight, the experience of actually seeing and hearing those RINOs fight, and fight hard, did much to evaporate the base’s former reasons for despising them.

Dear reader, you must understand that "compromise" and "bipartisanship" are Democrat synonyms for "give us what we want." Sorry, no. Welcome to the struggle, Senator Graham.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties. Undoing fifty years of judicial error and misplaced faith in Governance by Wise Experts is going to be a long twilight struggle.

Republicans seem particularly energized, some even willing to sweep aside their NeverTrump neuroses and row along with the rest of us. The challenging news is that this kind of resolve must be rekindled again and again and again. If majorities in both houses of Congress can be preserved in November, those Republican members installed in January had better be ready to take the next hill, and the next and the next. Do you think liberalism made its deep inroads with intermittent passion? I have long opposed the ideology of the left while admiring and envying its tireless devotion.

It can be our turn if we are up to the task. Let us bring Kavanaugh confirmation-style courage and energy to our fights for stronger borders, health care reform and fiscal sanity. Maybe a uniquely brave wing of the GOP can even prod the President on spending cuts.

We fought for Brett Kavanaugh not simply to win him a Supreme Court seat, or just to bolster the Constitution. This fight was necessary to deal a blow to the darkest of tactics and those who would deploy them.

They will not stop. They will not slink away. They are not defeated.

We cannot rest until people are ashamed to publicly call themselves "progressive" in the current sense of the word. Or, perhaps, until Democrat leaders change their message enough to be able to successfully campaign in the strongly Republican states.